No one can be in a band as long as The Beatles were without hitting a few stumbling blocks along the way.
Although the Fab Four always wanted to make the best album that they could when they walked into the studio, they could also be brutally honest when they didn’t care for one of the tracks one of their bandmates came in with. And while John Lennon could be absolutely vicious when it came to any and every tune that didn’t hit him the right way, he knew Paul McCartney could be equally as bitter.
Then again, it’s hard to think of that coming out of someone like Macca. The man is the embodiment of a ray of sunshine every single time he walked onstage, and even in interviews, he could always be incredibly diplomatic when there was a tune that didn’t seem to have the same magic that he was looking for. Even in Get Back, he seems perfectly cordial, but there were always times in the past when things didn’t work out.
He and Lennon were already at the peak of their songwriting powers by A Hard Day’s Night, but when they first began using the studio as an instrument on records like Revolver, the bassist ended up not showing up on tunes like ‘She Said She Said’ after he got into a fight with his bandmates and stormed out of the studio.
If he was mad about not getting his way that time, Sgt Peppers more than made up for it. The album became the de facto soundtrack for the Summer of Love, but listening through the record, most of it feels like McCartney’s vision, even if the best tunes on the record include he and Lennon’s collaborations like ‘A Day in the Life’. Regardless of how much fun Macca had, something had to change, and if Pepper was a concept album, The White Album was the anti-concept album in many respects.
Every song on the record was meant to represent a different mood they were feeling at the time, and while it did work for the most part, it’s not like you can’t feel the tension, either. All of them were getting fed up with each other, and even if it has absolute classics like ‘Blackbird’ and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ on it, Lennon remembered how much McCartney was displeased with the record before it was released.
When talking about his Beatle days, Lennon said that McCartney was massively disappointed in the final result, saying, “Paul was always upset about The White Album. He never liked it because on that one I did my music, he did his, and George did his. And first, he didn’t like George having so many tracks. He wanted it to be more a group thing, which really means more Paul. So he never liked that album.”
It’s not exactly a big ask for Harrison to get four songs on a double record, but the group effort idea isn’t all that strange coming from McCartney. He wanted the opportunity to play music with his mates again, but listening to ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’ next to ‘Revolution 9’, it’s clear that he and his writing partner were on two completely separate pages at this point.
A lot of that tension is hard to ignore when listening to The White Album, but that’s part of the reason why the record works so well as a whole. The tunes might not all be hits, and you’d have to do a bit of stretching to convince anyone that ‘Wild Honey Pie’ demanded to be heard, but for a band that seemed beyond human in many respects at the time, seeing their human side on this record was a welcome change of pace.
